It was so good to be together again.
Photo: @activebeergeek
After three years of remote Craft Malt Conferences, we (and everyone else we met) were thrilled to be able to meet with our craft malt community in person again. Friends and colleagues, handshakes and hugs, beer and whiskey in glass-clinking toasts were a welcome change from the COVID shadows of the last few years.
Fun and learning.
This is what the Craft Malt Conference has always been about for us, and not necessarily in that order. (Learning and fun?) The truth of the matter is that in this type of gathering, the two are inextricably combined.
Like most of the businesses at the conference, we have spent the last three years growing and learning, working and improving, but it’s never the same to do that work in isolation. So when we landed in Portland, ME we got right to business making up for lost time (and catching up on lost beer tastings in the process!) Thanks to open door policy of local breweries and malthouses, as well as the excellent planning of the Craft Maltsters Guild, we learned a lot. A few of our highlights:
Blue Ox Malthouse and the Floor Malting Community:
We visited Blue Ox Malthouse in Lisbon Falls, ME (just outside of Portland). Another multi-medal winner of the Malt Cup competition (they won a bronze in both the Pale Malt and the Light Munich categories,) they are a floor malting facility that is about to quadruple in capacity with a pending expansion. Owner and head maltster Joel Alex showed us around and explained how they use Maine-grown grain in their malthouse, sourced from farms in the northern part of the state. We’re always fascinated by visiting floor-malting facilities as they are so different from ours and we discovered that there are even more places doing floor malting than we realized. There’s more than one way to produce quality malt, and these folks are killing it.
Allagash Brewing Company and all the Maine Beer:
In addition to checking out Blue Ox, we also had the opportunity to tour Allagash Brewing Company in Portland guided by head brewer and Craft Maltsters Guild board director Branch Rothschild. We downed some Allagash White, their flagship Belgian-style wheat beer, and learned about the cutting-edge work they’re doing. They have an in-house coolship that they designed and built. (No idea what that is? They’ve got a great explanation of it here.) They’re also doing a mixed-culture fermentation program. It’s a pretty amazing place! We also managed to hit Harpoon Brewery, Portsmouth Brewery, Maine Beer Company, and Trillium Brewing Company. We could have continued the beer tours for the entire weekend (you know us!) but we also had some learning to do, which brings us to our biggest highlight…
The Conference and Learning:
The Craft Maltsters Guild did excellent work planning interesting talks on a wide range of topics. Of particular interest to us: the panel discussion about American Single Malt Whiskey. (Because, you know…we’ve got a Root Shoot American Single Malt Whiskey coming out, soon…) American Single Malt is going to be a huge part of the whiskey market in the US and beyond, and we’re so excited to be a part of that. We also got tips and tricks from Emily Hutto of Radcraft on “Using Craft Malt as a Megaphone” - a topic we’ve been highly invested in for years as we try to tell the story not just of the malt itself, but the entire farming and family process behind it.
The Craft Malt Conference consistently allows us to strengthen relationships with like-minded businesses, share knowledge, and keep up on industry trends.
It also allows us to meet with our people. And it’s the people - always the people - that make this conference so great.
We are always honored to be a part of this community, and we hope always to serve the craft malt community in any way that we can. We’re here, we’re engaged, and we’re excited to show up and spread the craft malt word.
One American Single Malt Whiskey (and locally-brewed beer!) at a time.
